‘Everybody wants to shoot the machine gun… until it’s timepick up brass and links.’

‘Everybody wants to shoot the machine gun… until it’s time to do range detail things and pick up brass and links.’

-Every Range Safety Officer at the end of a machine gun range day

For Training Tuesday, we have a tip out there for units to use when policing up after a machine gun range. If you have several hundred to thousands of rounds to police, sorting through it all can take a lot of time.

A really easy way to speed this process up is to use a magnet to pick up the steel links and separate them from the brass cartridges. These pictures illustrate some magnets that work well for this duty. Picture one shows a magnet that has a handle at the back side of the red body that allows the links to ‘release’ into the bucket.

The same can be done on a larger scale with the bar magnet on wheels in picture two. This can be moved over large sections of the range, and speed up the policing process. Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is lift up on the handle to ‘release’ the links into a container.

After the range has been raked, you can do the bar magnet on wheels again, to police up anything that came up in the raking.

Both of these items at available for a low price at places like Harbor Freight or Northern Tool. And while I know NCO’s have a tendency to spend money on things to do their job more efficiently. If you shoot a lot of machine guns, it is worth the investment to speed up the process.